Alaska

It’s been wet. Rustic. Cold. Wild. 

When I was getting ready to come out here a week ago, I was thinking it would be “fast forward into fall”. And sure enough, the first day, Tuesday 09/09, that’s how it felt: like autumn. Like I had been sped up a little, with respect to Colorado, into autumn. It was chilly, temperatures in the low forties going up to the mid-fifties for the high of the day; crisp air; damp and moist; yellow and golden leaves everywhere on the deciduous trees and many on the ground already, too. 

But then, on Friday & Saturday at Denali Park, it definitely became “fast forward into winter”: temperatures dropped to just above freezing; rain became sleet, then snow; very cold wind was blowing; and overnight we got over five inches of snow. 

I wasn’t ready for winter: not physically, not mentally, and barely with the clothes & gear I had brought. 

Now it’s autumn again, outside Fairbanks. 

I just wish it would clear up. I don’t mind the low temperatures as much as the constant cloud cover, the lack of sunshine, the impossibility to see the sky — the northern lights or aurora borealis, the starry sky, the long, pale, bright nordic sunshine. 

Alaska is wild. Wild in a way that I had never experienced before. Some things remind me of the Austrian Alps or southern Germany, of the summers I spent in the former with my family of origin, of the years I spent as a young professional in the latter. It’s the cold damp wet overcast weather. And the vegetation. But other than that, Alaska is nothing like anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s awesome in the original sense of the word, i.e. awe-inspiring. As we were driving from Fairbanks to Byers Lake and then partway back to Denali Park, I kept looking out the car window in awe and saying, “It’s so wild. So beautiful and wild. I’ve been out in nature a lot but I’ve never seen anything like this”.

“That’s because the wilderness comes right up to the highway”, my friend who’s spent the summer here for decades replied to me. And he’s right: that’s the point, I guess. The wilderness is everywhere, it’s right outside the front door, right up to the highway, as far as the eye can see. The highway, the roads, the cabins, the little buildings for gas stations, road-side diners or cafes, banks, State Trooper buildings — they’re all small, isolated human-made things surviving, adapting in the vast, powerful wilderness that just sits there. It’s just there: immense expanses of forest, spruce pines and birches and aspens; the red and brown bushes and shrubs of taiga and tundra; the brown and gray-black rock of the mountains, partly covered in snow; the brown and gray rivers and lakes — rivers and lakes and water everywhere. 

Water is everywhere, nature is everywhere. And within all this, here we are, small creatures adapting, surviving with our little cabins and sturdy (& mostly old) cars. 

It puts us in our place, gives us a sense of perspective, I think. 

It’s overwhelming, overpowering, humbling and at the same time liberating, refreshing.